Category Archives: 2017 Archives

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind and it wasn’t a lack of material or even a need for a break which prevented me from publishing a new newsletter, it was simply a lack of time. The weekend of the 10th I flew down to Charlotte, NC to join a group of men to pray and worship the Father. I know I have written of this in the past so I won’t go into great detail, but suffice it to say that it was an awesome time of refreshment, passion, and love for the Father and for other brothers in Christ. Much is often made of the divisions in the church, especially between the various denominations, but when a group of people come together with no other goal or agenda other than to worship God, the sense of unity of love is incredible.

Last weekend involved a number of time constraints, lunch with a couple after church, a scheduled time to play cards with our pastor and his wife, a shorter than normal nap time, and the need to finish preparing a lesson for the youth that evening. Of course, it did not help that in the course of preparing my lesson I got sidetracked creating an excel spreadsheet that contained a reading plan for my students to get through the gospels over the next couple of months. The reading plan itself did not take that long to create, the problem that I ran into was the hypotheticals. What if we did not start this until the following week? What if I wanted to re-use the reading plan in later years? What if I wanted to start on a day other than a Monday? These present problems because I like a spreadsheet where I have to make minimal changes to adapt it to other uses, meaning, I want to change the date in the first cell and have everything else calculate accordingly; I want the dates to always track and I want the Catch Up Days to always fall on a Sunday. This means that every field now has to be a formula, some of which require a certain level of detail and customization… It would never do to have my students scheduled to read Matthew chapter 29 or to stop reading at John chapter 20. Those of you familiar with Microsoft Excel know exactly what I am talking about, those of you who are not, all you need to understand is that I am a nerd.

Some of you questioned the veracity of my story concerning Jack walking up to our Christmas tree and sneezing upon our return from vacation. Thus it is with much pride that I present to you the picture above, proof that my stories are 100% true, verifiable, and unexaggerated.

I achieved a significant milestone about a week ago, in fact, one might goes as far as to call it a lifetime achievement. There is likely to be a trophy involved and I will most certainly be keeping a souvenir of my various trials to get to this moment. Just what exactly is it that I have achieved you might ask. Well dear readers, I used an entire tube of Chapstick… That’s right, I used it all the way to the bottom, or the top, depending on how you want to phrase your terminology. I admit, it was not easy, in fact, there were a number of times throughout the years leading up to this that I simply wanted to call it quits and move on to a different tube. There was the incident involving a toddler who thought it looked and smelled like candy, then there was the fiasco involving a truck and a warm summer day, nevertheless I suffered through using only a small corner of the stick until things levelled out. I want to thank my wife for all her emotional support and I want to give a big shout out to my sponsors, Chapstick and the cold, dry winters of upstate New York.

I don’t know if it was a change that was made at the beginning of 2017 or if I am simply just now starting to notice them, but has anyone else noticed that the signs denoting handicap parking have changed? Not just the signs but any new placed symbol for a handicap parking space or the placards allowing you to park there. When I first saw the new sign, I had to chuckle because all I could think was, “Wait, now you can only park here if you are in a wheelchair racing league?” I mean come on, what else could the new symbol possibly denote but someone involved in a wheelchair race? The upper torso arched forward in anticipation and for greater leverage granting faster motion, the arms thrown back in an exaggerated motion clearly indicating the velocity which the individual is trying to obtain, and finally the break in the lines of the circle demonstrating the rotational speed of the wheels. Wheelchair racer, no doubt about it.